I've always told people that my job is a great first job, but it's not the job I want to grow old in. Lately I've discovered that it's not even the job I want to hit 35 in.
I have a tenure-track position teaching music and interdisciplinary humanities at a community college in the East. My department is the most dynamic on campus, with energetic leadership and scads of talented faculty members. In May, I even got my hands on a shiny new doctoral diploma from an Ivy League university.
On paper, it sounds good, doesn't it? Wait till you meet my students.
Because the college does not offer a music degree program, my teaching efforts get funneled into courses that our dean quaintly describes as "enrichment." (That's code for "first to get hit when the budget ax falls.") I get one or two serious music students each semester; the rest make it abundantly clear that they would rather endure a colonoscopy than a Mozart symphony.
My colleagues who teach core courses like composition and speech are surprised by this, since they assume (as did I) that students, after reading the course description, choose their electives based on some interest in the material. Yet students who take my course on the history of American music are dismayed to discover that the entire semester will not, in fact, be spent zoning out to Jimi Hendrix, that recreational drugs are not provided as part of the course fee, and that the text has no chapter on "advanced crowd-surfing techniques." They feel they've been misled, somehow, that they're being denied the three weekly hours of guaranteed mindlessness (not to mention the easy A) to which their tuition dollars entitle them. After all, isn't that the point of consumer-driven education?
If their in-class attitude is disheartening, their written work, on average, is nothing short of dismal. In spite of having taken two college-level writing courses before coming to me, many of these students couldn't find the end of a sentence or the object of a preposition with a divining rod, a compass, and a guide dog. Papers assigned on Bernstein's "Overture to Candide" frequently come back with the work cited as the "Overture to Candida," "Overturned to Candied," or the "Oven of Candy." (For this reason, I studiously avoid any mention of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony.)
In my first year, I took this personally. I assumed there was something wrong with my approach. So I became a one-woman entertainment committee. I sang, I danced, I told jokes. I even considered stripping but was sadly prevented by the college dress code -- which, while remarkably unhelpful on the topic of appropriate teaching attire for women, does mandate that faculty members wear shoes at all times while on campus.
Now that I'm a little wiser, I recognize that these students aren't the devil's spawn they first appeared to be. They just have no interest in learning what I have to teach. The deal-breaking point for me is their expectation that I'll sanction their attitude, that I'll tacitly agree that my subject is dull and unimportant, and that I'll willingly participate in making myself irrelevant.
Of course, we all have some students like these. The cynics among us may even feel that they're becoming the rule rather than the exception. A job in which every student does the readings and is consistently bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in class exists only at Pipe Dream University (which also has ample parking and no committee meetings). But my idealism is dying a slow death in a place where netting 1 interested student out of 25 is considered a good haul.
The saddest part is that I really love my subject, and I adore teaching it (even if no one is listening). I secretly enjoy writing lectures at 6 a.m. I take pleasure in researching new classes, and I've grown exponentially as a musician and a teacher because of it. I'm so fascinated by the subject matter that I can't understand why these students aren't instantly hooked. But I've realized that many of them have never experienced that joy of learning. They've never felt the thrill of mastering a new skill or sensed new pathways in their brains lighting up with ideas previously unimagined.
What I really want is pretty simple -- a job where at least some of the students want to learn what I have to teach. I want to be part of a community in which music is important, and in which my skills and training are valued. I want at least a handful of students who have a passion for music and who are willing to devote sincere and enthusiastic effort to its study, because they love it, are insatiably curious about it, and just can't get over the amazing effect it has had on their lives.
I'm willing to move virtually anywhere in the country to find such a place.
When I finally received my doctorate this May, the whispered gossip among those of us who had survived the ordeal was that the offers would soon begin pouring in -- gold-plated contracts delivered on bended knee by liveried servants. I was going to have to fight them off with a stick. Sadly, there is nary a liveried servant in sight (on bended knee or otherwise), and my trusty stick languishes in the corner near my diploma, where they're both beginning to gather dust.
We spend years in doctoral programs training to be specialists, only to get into the real world and discover that we all have to be generalists. I'm forced to admit that I've actually really enjoyed that transition. In my current job, I don't teach a blessed thing that I'm officially trained to teach -- and I love it.
It's not that I don't want to teach the things that I've spent years studying, but these "extracurricular" areas are part of my entire approach to music now. They've changed the way I look at what I do and why I do it. In spite of my grousing, I suspect that these experiences have made me a better and more interesting person. I hope they've made me a more interesting and attractive candidate as well.
